Hotel Expansion Is Facing Opposition

August 31, 2002|By Clifford Krauss The New York Times

LAKE LOUISE VILLAGE, Alberta — It is the most famous picture postcard image of Canada's Rocky Mountain splendor: lovely Lake Louise shimmering under the giant Victoria glacier and surrounded by a dense forest of spruce and fir trees.

Normally, the only interruption to the tranquillity is the occasional thunderous clap of ice breaking off the glacier, bringing cries of glee from tourists paddling canoes below.

But the emerald lake in Banff National Park has become a battleground between a large Canadian hotel chain and environmentalists who say they must make a stand to save the country's 39 national parks from developers.

The issue at hand is a $45 million six-story addition to the giant Chateau Lake Louise hotel that has been the object of a series of lawsuits and environmental impact studies for nearly a decade.

The project has been swept up in a long-running battle between those who argue that the development must stop in order to preserve the wildlife of Canada's national parks and those who say that the park system is meant to serve the growing number of people who have made it part of a tourism industry that is vital to the Canadian economy.

Banff is already the most heavily developed national park in North America, entertaining more than 5 million visitors a year.

Environmentalists say that the addition of 81 rooms in a hotel wing to be used for conferences and conventions will put added stress on a fragile lake region where grizzly bears, lynx and wolverines are already threatened by as many as 20,000 tourists a day. Proponents say another couple of hundred visitors will not make that much of a difference.

"The reason we are polarized is because there are environmental lobbies who suggest that our national parks are wildlife preserves," said David Bayne, the Chateau Lake Louise general manager. "But they are for people also, and needs have to be balanced."

Noisy protests and a billboard campaign across the United States against the project have produced a major distraction for the Fairmont hotel chain, which has earned praise from environmental groups in the past for its recycling efforts.

"I like to say when this all started I had hair," said Bayne, the 55-year-old hotel general manager, who is thinning at the top.

Nevertheless, the chain has pledged to move ahead with construction. It has successfully battled the environmentalists in the courts so far, and workers cut down trees on the site this month in preparation for the start of construction.

Environmentalists and the local Siksika Indians are taking the hotel to court again, this time challenging its right to continue drawing water from the glacier lake in its back yard.

Edward Whittingham, a director of the Banff Environmental Action and Research Society, called the Banff project "highly symbolic" as a political barometer of how Canada's national parks are being treated.

"Banff, as our first national park and Canada's flagship park, often sets the tone for the entire park system," he said, adding that the Lake Louise project is another gash in what he calls "death by a thousand cuts."

The 5,500 members of the Siksika nation, who have land claims downstream from Lake Louise, want to reverse a recent Parks Canada decision to renew the resort's permit, arguing that their treaty rights were infringed because they were not consulted in a decision that they say will cause more pollution on their lands.

Joe Weasel Child, the Siksika land claims manager, said he does not care if his legal action cripples the hotel and forces it to close. "This is our land," he said. "And we are not waiting for the courts to decide either. We'll do what it takes. We have plans, but I don't have the authority to disclose them."